Client Stories

Look Who's Talking about Blackboard Collaborate

The creativity, passion, and innovation that our customers bring to online communication, education, and collaboration with Blackboard Collaborate is remarkable. Here’s what just some of our enthusiastic clients are saying.

To be successful managing large sessions, we have to use Blackboard Collaborate to its fullest. We quickly move students into breakout rooms. It's really easy to with a touch of the button to move students to the web and have one group working on a website, the other on a presentation. With a larger group, you have to break apart lecture time with those small group activities.

Many of our students have Android devices, and addressing those student needs directly will help increase the access to sessions and overall participation in classes. The Blackboard Collaborate mobile app provides students with more options to attend the live sessions and gives them no excuse to not attend.

We are really looking forward to having telephony included in the new version of Blackboard Collaborate. Telephony integration will provide essential functionality for our students who are located in rural areas of Mississippi as an option for when they don't have a stable Internet connection. This feature is going to improve the overall Blackboard Collaborate experience and ensure increased accessibility for our students and faculty.

The Android app enables a previously under-served audience to participate in live classes or office hours. Having the mobile app also reduces the amount of technical gear that faculty and students must purchase and carry around. And students can now watch session recordings from their mobile devices, which will increase their engagement and success.

— Mattias Marabotto, Manager Technology Integration, LMS, and Help Desk University of West Georgia|Online Faculty Development

The new phone integration is another example that the Collaborate team is listening—and now participants have more opportunities to listen. Based on feedback from the Product Advisory Council, the team has brought forward this new web conferencing tool. Results from beta are positive. For those who may think the great "mobile app" makes this unnecessary, remember a good tool box has many kinds of wrenches.

— Jim Wolfgang, Director Digital Innovations Group Georgia College & State University

Support for Android devices helps our accessibility initiative by giving students more options for communicating with their instructors at a distance. Students can attend a quick, on-the-go tutoring session or drop into an instructor's virtual office via their Android Smartphone. No computer required.

— Jason Busbin, Student Support Specialist University of West Georgia|Online Faculty Development

Our faculty and staff use online meeting tools to support our students enhance instruction. In emergency situations, like Super Storm Sandy, the telephony and ad hoc meeting capabilities allow us to continue instruction, communicate with our stakeholders, and keep operations running smoothly.

Blackboard Collaborate has changed my life teaching online. And now it is changing my life as a mother. I have been using this tool teaching my 6 year old at home recently, and he loves it as learning can be so much fun. All of sudden, he gets so excited about writing and keeps on writing for hours! And he told me the other day I was a fun teacher. This is the best reward I ever get as a teacher.

— Bei Zhang, Teacher and Mother

We wanted to make the STEM activities and assignments optional in order to gage interest and participation. We never imagined we would have such a success rate!

Everything in our society is going mobile, and we believe education needs to do the same. Blackboard Collaborate mobile web conferencing is an essential piece of that puzzle, allowing us to bring learning to students anywhere they go. What a great opportunity for us!

— Mark Gensimore, Vice President Business and Professional Development blendedschools.net

We are extremely pleased that Blackboard Collaborate, a key component to our online strategy, is accommodating our growing mobile device community with an excellent mobile product and roadmap. The deep integration of Blackboard Collaborate with our eLearning suite and the flexibility of the mobile client will allow us to accommodate our eLearning live collaboration objectives.

We have seen double-digit growth yearly with use of mobile access to Blackboard Learn. Having a mobile collaboration app, such as Blackboard Collaborate mobile web conferencing, will be the icing on the cake for our campus to provide the innovative degree programs our students so richly deserve.

— Marcel Brechtoldt System Admin-Principal and Senior Lecturer University of Missouri-St. Louis

Stevens is looking forward to the echo cancellation feature of Blackboard Collaborate 12. Our professors like to use the 'lock talk' feature and walk around while using web conferencing just as they would in the live classroom. Not having to use a headset to avoid the echo will allow them to use VoIP technology without being tethered.

Blackboard Collaborate's new echo cancellation tool will allow inclusion of our online learners who don't have access to headsets and microphones. Students can use all the functionality of their laptops/PCs without having to purchase additional equipment to fully participate in online video conferencing session.

— Dominic Gore eLearning Development and Support Officer University College Birmingham

I have been impressed with how open the Blackboard Collaborate development team is to user participation in interface design. We were able to prioritize needs for the product based on a wide variety of user experiences from many institutions. Through this process, the Blackboard Collaborate user interface was essentially designed by thousands of users of both Wimba and Elluminate.

As our K-12 schools move to respond to meeting the needs of both Common Core and educator evaluation systems, it has become critical to provide just-in-time and just-enough support. Blackboard Collaborate is allowing the New York Institute of Technology and the New York State Teacher Centers to provide customized instruction and to create a recorded library of support videos for the 267,000 K-12 teachers that they serve. Critical to the success of the delivery has been the ecosystem, built into Blackboard Collaborate, that allows us to take the best aspects of traditional face-to-face classroom experiences and integrate them with the tools of online collaboration and interaction all accessible on devices that the teachers use in their daily work and personal activities.

— Stan Silverman, Director New York Institute of Technology

Blackboard Collaborate provides us with an effective virtual solution for meetings that would otherwise require extensive participant travel to a centralized location. We also utilize Blackboard Collaborate's recording capability to share webinar links with employees who were unable to attend live meetings or need to review information that was presented.

— Chris Hall Administrative Technology Manager Gaston County Schools

As a trainer in the high-tech industry, I find the Blackboard Collaborate platform a great way to host my online training. The breakout rooms allow me to assist my attendees in completing their hands-on exercises, making it a truly interactive session. I receive the published recording URL within minutes after ending my training session, allowing me to quickly follow up with my customers.

— Kindra Reid Education Manager Genius.com

We'd like to see increased enrollment and a lot of that will be through online programs – and Blackboard Collaborate will be a big part of that. I see Blackboard Collaborate as an integral part of our growth. If we didn't have Blackboard Collaborate, as a department chair I don't see how that program could grow.

Blackboard Collaborate came off the bench and hit a home run for North Dakota in 2009, when spring flooding forced Valley City State University to close down and send students home with just weeks remaining in the semester. We relied on Blackboard Collaborate, in addition to other technologies, to connect with the scattered students and complete their coursework, salvaging the semester.

We initially created CCC Confer to save time by holding meetings online but we expanded courses, too. One of our instructors conducted a two-year survey and found that courses that were taught online with a synchronous component had a higher retention rate, success rate, persistence rate, and students earned more A’s and B’s.

— Blaine Morrow Project Director CCC Confer

Central Texas College renewed its Blackboard Collaborate license because it has proven to be a cost effective and efficient means of providing communication and collaboration within our online and blended courses. Because our students, faculty, and staff are worldwide, we also use Blackboard Collaborate for faculty and staff training and professional development, student orientations and workshops, and for tech support.

At Red Deer College, teaching and learning would not be the same without our Blackboard Collaborate products. Our learners, which include students, faculty and staff, use its products daily to communicate, collaborate and grow together. They’ve become core to our business.

Blackboard Collaborate is unquestionably a “game-changer,” a disruptive technology, if you will, when it comes to e-learning. The ability for faculty and students to collaborate in real-time breathes new life into the online classroom by giving aural and kinesthetic learners what they have needed for years—a synchronous learning experience. What has surprised me the most is that faculty who teach in a traditional classroom are discovering that they can better leverage its asynchronous tools to extend learning beyond the time-and-space limits of the traditional classroom. Through the archive and file download features, students are able to benefit exponentially from repeated interaction with content and collaborative experiences. Blackboard Collaborate is a perfect blend of synchronous and asynchronous learning environments in a user friendly package. I would not want to develop an online program without it.

We can conduct the trainings basically same way we did them face-to-face. A lot of other offices are using Blackboard Collaborate in similar ways. So instead of conducting a training in which state trainers went to into a school to meet with the principals or teachers, now, because we’re unable to provide reimbursements, we simply offer online sessions with administrators from the school districts rather than travel.

An instructor came to me wanting to use Second Life for virtual office hours. I asked him what his goals were and he said he wanted to be accessible to students and have it be more personal than text on a screen. As soon as I was done showing the video and screen sharing in Blackboard Collaborate’s enterprise instant messenger, he was SOLD.

— Jane Himmel, Associate Director Center for Distributed Learning University of North Texas

We wanted to reduce costs for our districts but also expand offerings. We’re a large state and the center is mostly wilderness, so we saw a big need for a learning space for meetings and for professional development. I’ve never seen a technology adopted so quickly.

— Dr. Cheryl Charlton, CEO Idaho Digital Learning Academy

We have seen astounding results in student achievement as a direct result of using Blackboard Collaborate. The first principals’ online conference was a “Eureka” experience as all participants experienced being able to meet and exchange what they were doing and learning without leaving their buildings! I thought you might appreciate how much Blackboard Collaborate has meant to the principals and teachers.